IMPT collaboration
The Innovative Materials Platform Twente (IMPT) is a collaborative project of the Saxion Knowledge Center for Design and Technology, the Industrial Design Centre, BiomimicryNL and the regional business community.
The IMPT organises periodical networking events to promote cross-pollination between local companies by highlighting the latent knowledge and application possibilities. The aim is to boost knowledge regarding usefulness of the new material related technology, and to support the process in which material concepts are extracted, and made practically and actively available to the companies involved.
The IMPT project entails three phases:
- Scouting and screening: inventorying promising materials.
- Transformation: translating new material technology into product applications.
- Dissemination: preparing material fact sheets and developing design cases.
The meeting took place at Maan Engineering, a research based company that focuses on adhesive issues. These adhesive issues are resolved with practical solutions that result in customer-specific production processes or customer-specific gluing machines.
The tour of their company was inspiring. One example showed plasma treating surfaces to improve adhesion, an example that already has practical applications in the form of optical bonding – a process where the gap between display and touch screen layer is filled up with a clear material to improve the visual quality of the resulting display assembly.
This visit really was the perfect metaphor for the IMPT’s objective to cement knowledge in the regional business community.